Shifting the Frame – Women’s Photographic Practices (1840–1960)
RESEARCH PROJECT | FCT/PeX [2023.11306.PEX] 

What They Saw/What We See, Women Photographers in Portugal 1860–1920

Day 1

05.03.2026

9h

Reception and registration of participants

9h30

Opening and presentation of the WomenPhot.PT research project with Dr Jorge Sobrado, Councillor for Culture at the Câmara Municipal do Porto.

Susana Lourenço Marques

10h 

[Keynote speaker]

“A Room of One’s Own”: Retratadas and Subrogated Self-Representation in 19th-Century Spain

Stéphany Onfray (PhD in Art History, Complutense University of Madrid / independent researcher and curator)  

Chair – Emília Tavares 

11h20 

Coffee Break

11h40 

Panel 1. Professional Pioneer Women Photographers: independence and emancipation 

Chair – Susana Lourenço Marques

1. Who was Madame Fritz? A female itinerant daguerreotypist in Lisbon in 1844

– Maria de los Santos Felguera (Pompeu Fabra University) and Gregorio Escalada (independent researcher)

2. Chained to Light: Reconnecting with Finnish Photographer Julia Widgrén (1842– 1917)

– Heta Kaisto (Aalto University)

3. Isabel Agnes Cowper: Official Museum Photographer

– Erika Lederman (V&A, London)

4. Louise Engen: Making Women Visible – in Photography and Politics

– Sigrid Lien (University of Bergen)

5. Ordinary studios, extraordinary legacies. Rethinking women’s photography through a local “no-name” story from interwar Poland

– Katarzyna Gebarowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń)

13h15

Lunch

14h30

Panel 2. Rethinking Photographic Canons: Women, Networks and Practices

Chair – Susana S. Martins

1. Her Designated Place. Re-canonising Bauhaus Women Photographers through the Lens of Access

– Carla Huttenloher (Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin)

2. The creative challenge of Stern and Auerbach’s Ringl + Pit studio: a model of female emancipation in German advertising photography (1930-1933)

– Arianna Novaga (IUSVE Venezia, Italy)

3. Photo-press, photomontage, photobook: Denise Bellon and the circulation of images (1934-39)

– Bridget Hardiman (University of St Andrews)

4. Cut Out: Feminist Photographic Collage and Women’s Visual Practices, 1840–1960

Fiona Rogers (V&A, London)

15h50 

Coffee Break

16h

Panel 3. Class, Gender and Amateur Photography 

Chair – Ana Gandum

1. “A Photographic Lab of One’s Own”: Maria Pia Fecit – A case study unveiling the class-gender [and racial] biases of the official (His)story of photography

– Teresa Mendes Flores (ICNOVA – NOVA University of Lisbon)

2. Women competitors at the International Salon of Photographic Art (1937–1958): presence, networks and (in)visibility

– Nuno Resende (University of Porto)

3. Visual dialogues between Barcelona and São Paulo: The work of Palmira Puig (1937–1980)

– Nayara Fernandes Coelho (University of Barcelona)

4. Bringing Rosalie into Focus – An unexplored amateur photographer at Arlington Court, Devon, UK 

– Jess McKenzie and Dr Barbara Wood, National Trust (England, Wales & Northern Ireland)

17h30 

Round-table

Women Photographic Archive: Methods, Conservation and Access

Paula Figueiredo and Sofia Castro (Municipal Archive of Lisbon/Photographic); Alexandra Encarnação and Élia Roldão (Museums and Monuments of Portugal / Photographic Documentation Archive)

Chair – Nuno Borges de Araújo

18h20 

Special guest-speakers

Correcting the record: making female presences visible in early photography

Chair – Susana S. Martins

Constance Talbot: revisiting her 1839 ‘favourite view’

– Rose Teanby (Royal Photographic Society)

Breaking the archival silence: Tracking first Texas photographer, ‘Mrs. Davis’

– Kris Belden-Adams (Texas A&M University)

19h00 Guided visit to Romantic Museum with Bárbara Martinho

Day 2

06.03.2026

10h 

Panel 4 – Archives, Vernacular Images and Colonial Contexts

Chair – Afonso Dias Ramos

1. Dawn’s long gone, fields torn bare / Within the earth, lain unmarked there / What happened here, by no means right / Same’s fate befalls, on this night 

– Azura Silberschmidt (independent researcher)

2. Mary L. Booth and the Monuments of Western India: two albums

– Suryanandini Narain (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

3. Framing empire: girls, photography, and scrapbooks in the British Colonial World, c. 1930s

– Elizabeth Dillenburg (The Ohio State University)

4. Photographic Archive of Dona Palmira Coutinho

– vinit agarwal (independent researcher)

11h20 

Coffee Break

11h40

Panel 5 – Framing Empire and Conflict: Women, Photography and Power

Chair – Luís Camanho

1. Diana Powell-Cotton and Antoinette Powell-Cotton: snapshots from Angola (1936–1937)

– Inês Vieira Gomes (NOVA University Lisbon)

2. High Country, Wild Country: a feminist retelling of the visual culture of Mt. Buffalo

– Clare McCracken (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

3. Women photographers and photo interpreters during WW2

– Denis Pellerin (The Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy)

4. Photographic Invisibility and Archival Recovery: The Case of Martha Rocher (1920–1990)

– Raffaella Perna (University La Sapienza of Rome)

13h 

Lunch

14h30

Panel 6 – Women, Documentary Photography and Social Engagement

Chair – Mário Moura

1. The invisible legacy of Kati Horna: photographic experimentation, social documentation, and architectural photography in Mexico

– Eunice Miranda Tapia (University of Seville)

2. From the Studio to the Street: Re-interpreting Nelly’s Documentary Practice

– Alexandra Moschovi (University of Sunderland)

3. Chiara Samugheo: The Neorealist Spirit of Italian Photography

– Michela Frontino (Academy of Fine Arts in Bari)

4. Reactivating the archive: Portuguese paratrooper nurses between imagery and memory

– Margarida Correia (University of Lisbon)

15h50 

Coffee Break

16h

Panel 7 – Working with Fragments: Women, Photography and the Archive

Chair – Emilia Tavares

1. Elsbeth Gropp – Reconstruction and exhibition of an almost forgotten oeuvre

– Volker Hille (Cologne City Museum)

2. Fotografiste. Archives, Feminism, and Fragments of Women’s Work in Photography

– Linda Bertelli (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca) and Agnese Ghezzi (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)

3. Rediscovering Andalusian Women Photographers: Gender, region, and photography in 19th and early 20th century

– Azahara Lozano Dorado (University of Seville)

4. Archival Fragmentation and Gendered Erasures: Reconstructing the Photographic Legacy of Laura Pons (1889–1975)

– Giorgia Ravaioli (University of Bologna, ISIA Urbino)

5. Silver Girls as a Curatorial Platform for Recovering Early Women Photographers’ Histories Through Open-Ended Research

– Šelda Puķīte (independent researcher)

18h

[Keynote speaker]

Italian Women Photographers at the beginning of the 20th century between Avant-garde experiences and identity performance. Reflections from a research project and a digital collection

Federica Muzzarelli  (University of Bologna)

Chair – Susana Lourenço Marques

20h30

Conference dinner

Day 3 

•  

9h30

Panel 8 – Inventing Images: Women and Photographic Technologies

Chair – Ana Pereira

1. Tangled up in Blue: The Cyanotype, Needlework, and Women’s Labor in Julia Herschel’s A Handbook for Greek and Roman Lace Making

– Beth Saunders (University of Maryland)

2. Florence M. Warner: Inventor and Entrepreneur

– Mariana W. von Hartenthal (independent researcher)

3. Between Name and Image: Mildred Cossart and the Construction of a Photographic Gaze on Madeira (1909–1928)

– Ana Gandum (RABL – Madeira Regional Directorate for Archives, Librairies and Book; NOVA University Lisbon – ICNOVA) and Martinho Mendes (DRABL – Madeira Regional Directorate for Archives, Librairies and Book)

4. A Flash in Time: Gioconda Rizzo (1897–2004) and Early Brazilian Photography 

– Ingrid Telino (University Institute of Lisbon – ISCTE)

10h50 

Coffee Break

11h

Panel 9 – Performing the Self: Women, Photography and Authorship

Chair – Lúcia Almeida Matos

1. Between Subject and Author: Sarah Bernhardt and the Photographic Portrait as Performative Self-Portrait

– Nicole Langrová (University of West Bohemia)

2. “Private” – Marie Høeg & Bolette Berg: Non-cathartis as an ethics of opacity 

– Amy Schuessler (Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts)

3. Mirrors and viewpoints: photo albums and women’s practices of the self

– Katarzyna Adamska and Monika Michałowicz (Museum of Warsaw Centre of Photography)

12h15

[Keynote speaker]

Women & Photography @ Musée d’Orsay (Paris). The Ten Years Itch

Marie Robert (Musée d’Orsay) 

Chair – Afonso Dias Ramos